Ray's blog

The world’s experience with globalisation — the widespread transfer of peoples, technologies and cultures — did not begin in our time. Scholars argue that it dates back to 1492, when European migration, together with movements of Asians, Africans and Native Americans, forged the global relationships that help shape life to this day.

“My mother was her own Ellis Island,” Luis Torres says about his mother, a Salvadoran immigrant, who fled the civil war and found refuge in California in the 80’s.

“Everybody has come through her door, her apartment while they established themselves in the U.S. and that would not have happened had she not come here,” Torres recalls about his uncles who rejoined his mother in the United States.

Day after day, I continue to be struck by the dignity and positivity of people, and their ability to cope, in what is often the direst of circumstances – most recently in Libya, Yemen, Iraq and Nigeria.